I have a few friends who work for InBev here in Phoenix, they don't complain...what makes them the "worst ever"? Just because of crappy beer?And are companies like Google and UPS on this list as "longshots"? Or am I missing something from them?

My local hospital also deserves a dishonorable mention.They've bought out roughly 75% of the practices within 20 miles and relocated all the offices to their building; nearly every doc in the county is now employed by this one hospital. If your doc was one of the ones involved in this you have to pay the hospital a $1200 a year charge to keep seeing him, otherwise you'll get assigned randomly to whoever they feel like.

Hobodeluxe:Snarcoleptic_Hoosier: Considering the damage to the US for last 30 years, I nominate Walmart to hold the title indefinitely.

Walmart is just a symptom of bad trade policies.

A symptom which makes it the largest company on the planet, a company that puts continuous downward pressure on all costs (including labor) and helps redefine a lower standard for the entire American retail industry, a company that has three owners on the Forbes top 10 list and openly provides forms for employees to apply for public assistance. Walmart is symptom of trickle down snake oil peddlers, but it's grown from an effect to a cancer.

As long as Walmart is as powerful as it is, labor's power will NEVER improve more than fractional increments.

gunga galunga:Elzar: Jesus there are a bunch of farking whiners about Sim City. I've played Sim City since a couple days after launch and no issues for me. Of course I am rather casual, but still...

I love the SimCity series but held off on this latest one after the bad press. How does it measure up to the others in the series?

From what I've heard: the city sizes are smaller, you (and EA's servers) have to be in constant contact, it's forced multiplayer, and because of the multiplayer aspect you can't save and reload.

That last bit is what would really irk me. They've taken away the opportunity to say "GOD DAMN IT" and wipe out your city in a hailstorm of godzilla, meltdowns, and hurricanes - then reload the last save tomorrow.

Every experience I've had with Walmart in the last few years has been horrendous.

Avoid it as much as I can now.

Don't know how they stay in business. Target manages to not screw things up... they're often cheaper than Walmart... their stores are better maintained and they don't make you wait forever at a single register with 30 others closed.

No reason to shop at Walmart usually.

I like PayPal. Ups and fedex are good.

Wanted to buy simcity but declined due to always online. Never bit-torrented a game in my life... possible Simcity will be first if someone hacks the online aspect out .

gunga galunga:Elzar: Jesus there are a bunch of farking whiners about Sim City. I've played Sim City since a couple days after launch and no issues for me. Of course I am rather casual, but still...

I love the SimCity series but held off on this latest one after the bad press. How does it measure up to the others in the series?

It lacks the features and fun of SimCity predecessors... it's basically a facebook game, only without the facebook. I'm sure it's right for someone, but the lack of bulldozers to raise/lower terrain, the lack of subways and options like that, the dumbed-down AI, and the staggeringly small city maps that limit you to building East Davenport, IA (you can build it several times in the same region) are just too many factors to overcome. The initial server outages, and day 1 dlc, combined with EAs history of shuttering servers as soon as they release a follow up game, that's just icing on the cake.

The game is probably right for someone, but calling it SimCity is a gross misnomer.

Kyosuke:I have a hard time giving grief to companies like WalMart, various banks, various internet providers, and various airlines, because they are giving the consumer exactly what they want: Cheapness.

Want decent service and products? STOP SHOPPING BY PRICE ALONE.

Got it?

Indeed. WalMart exists because we demand it. It is the result of market forces, and nothing other than market forces.

CleanAndPure:Every experience I've had with Walmart in the last few years has been horrendous.

Avoid it as much as I can now.

Don't know how they stay in business. Target manages to not screw things up... they're often cheaper than Walmart... their stores are better maintained and they don't make you wait forever at a single register with 30 others closed.

No reason to shop at Walmart usually.

I like PayPal. Ups and fedex are good.

Wanted to buy simcity but declined due to always online. Never bit-torrented a game in my life... possible Simcity will be first if someone hacks the online aspect out .

AB will beat EA.AB is horrible in the world of beer. They even changed Bud and a few other brands in the name of profit; in order to make up for a drop in sales. They could be good for smaller places, buying up a few good brews, not changing them and increasing distribution. But they are farking everything up and will keep doing so as they make a ton of cash.Still I have to say BOA should win as far as actual impact on the country in a negative way. I mean I can still get/make good beer regardless of what AB does. AIG should be on there.

MindStalker:I never understood the hate for paypal. They aren't a bank, they don't have deposit insurance, but in general they've always tried to do the right thing. But when person X screws over person Y using paypal, paypal can't just throw money away and make it all better. All the accounts of paypal "locking funds" are temporary, and only last until paypal is sure that credit charges can't be reversed, leading paypal holding the bad.

1. Paypal had a nasty habit of using "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" when responding to bad charges. So if someone bought a widget off you for $1.00, and THEY sold something on ebay for $20, and the person who bought THAT stole a credit card to make that bid; payPal would lock all three of your accounts and pilfer all of the money inside of all of them to make themselves whole from the third theft. So if you had $600.00 in your account, the whole $600 would be gone because you legitimately sold a $1 widget.

2. Not to mention if an account ever had more than 5k in it, they would lock the account for at least two years, possibly forever, as 'obviously money laundering', and keep the money for themselves. They borked pennyArcade and somethingAwful.com's Hurricane releif, and Minecraft's Notch this way to the tune of over 20k a pop, merely for the crime of having "too much money" in the account. (They did finally let Notch go, although this may have more to do with the Nordic banking laws than any activity on payPal's part)

This led to a lot of really bad feeling when someone would be collecting money from multiple people kickstarter-style for a central purpose (charity, a major project, a group/class trip) and paypal would steal the money inside the account under cause 1 or cause 2, leaving the account-holder holding the bag for dozens, if not hundreds of screaming clients, demanding product and/or their money back and being unable to provide either, because payPal had all the money. And payPal was not a bank and needs to provide absolutely nothing under its mandatory arbitration agreement, so legally they never have to give you your money back at all, yet you may still be liable to the buyers for providing a refund of the money stolen by payPal out of your own pocket. I've seen dozens of such cases.

PayPal ranks, in my book, right next to Nigerian spammers on the trustworthiness scale, one step *under* BoA.

Karac:My local hospital also deserves a dishonorable mention.They've bought out roughly 75% of the practices within 20 miles and relocated all the offices to their building; nearly every doc in the county is now employed by this one hospital. If your doc was one of the ones involved in this you have to pay the hospital a $1200 a year charge to keep seeing him, otherwise you'll get assigned randomly to whoever they feel like.

Stage II Grade 3c ovarian cancer patient has her treatment center bought out by another center. They now won't pull blood through a port. Unfortunately, she has to go to another lab which means her CA-125 results can differ by a hundred points or so due to different equipment.

Can we nominate The Consumerist for inclusion. We have a poll on worst companies that's only open for 3 hours a day but we're not going to tell you anywhere in the article about it what 3 hours those are. A simple "Polls will be open from 9am-noon Eastern time" (or whatever they're open) would go a long way

firefly212:gunga galunga: Elzar: Jesus there are a bunch of farking whiners about Sim City. I've played Sim City since a couple days after launch and no issues for me. Of course I am rather casual, but still...

I love the SimCity series but held off on this latest one after the bad press. How does it measure up to the others in the series?

It lacks the features and fun of SimCity predecessors... it's basically a facebook game, only without the facebook. I'm sure it's right for someone, but the lack of bulldozers to raise/lower terrain, the lack of subways and options like that, the dumbed-down AI, and the staggeringly small city maps that limit you to building East Davenport, IA (you can build it several times in the same region) are just too many factors to overcome. The initial server outages, and day 1 dlc, combined with EAs history of shuttering servers as soon as they release a follow up game, that's just icing on the cake.

The game is probably right for someone, but calling it SimCity is a gross misnomer.

That's my feeling as well. The lack of subways especially hurts because the maps are so small and traffic congestion can become a major game breaker. No power lines, no pipes, no ordinances, no prisons or military bases there are no real decisions at all for you to make except where to drop zones and roads. once the novelty wears off of the beatiful graphics and fun music it is an incredibly hollow Simcity experience.

I don't know ... Wells Fargo could probably give them a run for their money.My previous bank, Wachovia, was bought out by WF. I got at least one new charge or fee on my account every month for the next sixth months.$20 overdraft protection fee - I haven't used it in the 15 years I had the account. Not once, even in high school.$25 student account fee - because apparently they thought I was in the 30th grade of high school.$10 fee for sending me new checks I never requested that now say WF on them.$30 low balance / low use fee which they automatically charged everyone on the 1st of the month, but would refund at the end of the month if it didn't apply.

Sure, I got them to refund or rescind every one of those fees, but enough was well and farking enough. The manager couldn't quite understand why I wanted to close my account the last time I went in. She also seemed personally offended I wouldn't take a check and demanded cash money. My other account, and only now, is with Navy Fed. The nearest branch may be 200 miles away, but they've never tried to screw me over.

Karac:gunga galunga: Elzar: Jesus there are a bunch of farking whiners about Sim City. I've played Sim City since a couple days after launch and no issues for me. Of course I am rather casual, but still...

I love the SimCity series but held off on this latest one after the bad press. How does it measure up to the others in the series?

From what I've heard: the city sizes are smaller, you (and EA's servers) have to be in constant contact, it's forced multiplayer, and because of the multiplayer aspect you can't save and reload.

That last bit is what would really irk me. They've taken away the opportunity to say "GOD DAMN IT" and wipe out your city in a hailstorm of godzilla, meltdowns, and hurricanes - then reload the last save tomorrow.

Elzar:Jesus there are a bunch of farking whiners about Sim City. I've played Sim City since a couple days after launch and no issues for me. Of course I am rather casual, but still...

It has a lot of issues. They probably did rush the release and didn't do good beta testing / QA.

Some of the issues I've seen have been connectivity issues. You get disconnected and then when you try to log back in you're told it's too busy and try again in 18 minutes (with a convenient count down timer). I don't know about you, but 18 minutes from now I might be doing something else like walking to dog or cooking dinner.

At least they gave away a free game as compensation for nerds not being able to connect to a server. ;)

gunga galunga:Karac: gunga galunga: Elzar: Jesus there are a bunch of farking whiners about Sim City. I've played Sim City since a couple days after launch and no issues for me. Of course I am rather casual, but still...

I love the SimCity series but held off on this latest one after the bad press. How does it measure up to the others in the series?

From what I've heard: the city sizes are smaller, you (and EA's servers) have to be in constant contact, it's forced multiplayer, and because of the multiplayer aspect you can't save and reload.

That last bit is what would really irk me. They've taken away the opportunity to say "GOD DAMN IT" and wipe out your city in a hailstorm of godzilla, meltdowns, and hurricanes - then reload the last save tomorrow.

Sim Tree:MindStalker: I never understood the hate for paypal. They aren't a bank, they don't have deposit insurance, but in general they've always tried to do the right thing. But when person X screws over person Y using paypal, paypal can't just throw money away and make it all better. All the accounts of paypal "locking funds" are temporary, and only last until paypal is sure that credit charges can't be reversed, leading paypal holding the bad.

1. Paypal had a nasty habit of using "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" when responding to bad charges. So if someone bought a widget off you for $1.00, and THEY sold something on ebay for $20, and the person who bought THAT stole a credit card to make that bid; payPal would lock all three of your accounts and pilfer all of the money inside of all of them to make themselves whole from the third theft. So if you had $600.00 in your account, the whole $600 would be gone because you legitimately sold a $1 widget.

2. Not to mention if an account ever had more than 5k in it, they would lock the account for at least two years, possibly forever, as 'obviously money laundering', and keep the money for themselves. They borked pennyArcade and somethingAwful.com's Hurricane releif, and Minecraft's Notch this way to the tune of over 20k a pop, merely for the crime of having "too much money" in the account. (They did finally let Notch go, although this may have more to do with the Nordic banking laws than any activity on payPal's part)

This led to a lot of really bad feeling when someone would be collecting money from multiple people kickstarter-style for a central purpose (charity, a major project, a group/class trip) and paypal would steal the money inside the account under cause 1 or cause 2, leaving the account-holder holding the bag for dozens, if not hundreds of screaming clients, demanding product and/or their money back and being unable to provide either, because payPal had all the money. And payPal was not a bank and needs to provide abso ...

Umm, yea, all false, I'm not sure about the validity of your first claim, please provide some proof. As your second claim, the worst its done is freeze assets, its always eventually unfroze them or reversed the charges. I've received tens of thousands spread out over a few years through paypal legitimately from payments for web programming and never had an ounce of issues with them. I've looked into several of these past claims of "paypal stole my money" and its always been that no, paypal just froze your money and eventually gave it back, or paypal gave your money to a scammer because the scammer reversed charges, and yes, that is a problem, but it wasn't paypal doing the stealing.

zulius:I have a few friends who work for InBev here in Phoenix, they don't complain...what makes them the "worst ever"? Just because of crappy beer?And are companies like Google and UPS on this list as "longshots"? Or am I missing something from them?

Yay, let's ask the most entitled people on Earth which companies they think are the worst and trumpet that as some sort of news!

Let's not use a more scientific means, or talk to people who actually know what the fark they're talking about. Let's eviscerate a video game company once again because SimCity wasn't as great as it should have been!

I'm not sure the mechanical failures were really the fault of Carnival. They could have been better prepared I guess, but feeding and dealing with a couple thousand old, fat tourists can't be easy when you don't have power.

I'm sure all victims were full refunded and given either cash or another cruise on da house. Then there'll be the lawsuits that follow... what fun!

I don't know ... Wells Fargo could probably give them a run for their money.My previous bank, Wachovia, was bought out by WF. I got at least one new charge or fee on my account every month for the next sixth months.$20 overdraft protection fee - I haven't used it in the 15 years I had the account. Not once, even in high school.$25 student account fee - because apparently they thought I was in the 30th grade of high school.$10 fee for sending me new checks I never requested that now say WF on them.$30 low balance / low use fee which they automatically charged everyone on the 1st of the month, but would refund at the end of the month if it didn't apply.

Sure, I got them to refund or rescind every one of those fees, but enough was well and farking enough. The manager couldn't quite understand why I wanted to close my account the last time I went in. She also seemed personally offended I wouldn't take a check and demanded cash money. My other account, and only now, is with Navy Fed. The nearest branch may be 200 miles away, but they've never tried to screw me over.

"30th grade of high school"

Hahaha....thanks for my 1st genuine laugh of the day. And as a former asst. bank manager looking for a job, I will steer clear of WF now.

Although I doubt they'll win #1, I at least want AT&T to get to the semifinals. This is mainly due to me asking one of their customer service reps via chat what the average latency is in my area (just curious about switching over from Time Warner, who also sucks balls). The answer I got was "it's fiber optics, there is no such latency".

So there you have it folks, AT&T is now offering faster than light data transfer. You get the information before it's even been sent to you! Wow! Einstein ain't got nothin on AT&T!

Slaxl:Elzar: Jesus there are a bunch of farking whiners about Sim City. I've played Sim City since a couple days after launch and no issues for me. Of course I am rather casual, but still...

Judging from what I've read most of the systems that make people move about the city are completely broken. If that's true then surely you must have noticed something?

The only reason I haven't bought it is because it seems the simulation aspect is non-existant. I can live with DRM, as much as it irks me, but I can't live with a city building game that doesn't simulate aspects of standard, basic, city life. So I would be interested to know if anyone else has had no problems with it, and in fact thought it very well simulated.

This right here. A real Sim City would see your new roads and buildings held up because corrupt city councilmen want to give their friends favors, rather than get anything useful built for the city. And you'd face recall election threats from citizens b*tching about their taxes being raised.

Peepeye:I don't know ... Wells Fargo could probably give them a run for their money.My previous bank, Wachovia, was bought out by WF. I got at least one new charge or fee on my account every month for the next sixth months.$20 overdraft protection fee - I haven't used it in the 15 years I had the account. Not once, even in high school.$25 student account fee - because apparently they thought I was in the 30th grade of high school.$10 fee for sending me new checks I never requested that now say WF on them.$30 low balance / low use fee which they automatically charged everyone on the 1st of the month, but would refund at the end of the month if it didn't apply.

Can we nominate The Consumerist?...Just because they disabled their own on-site Comment system months and months ago, blamed "hackers", promised they would have it back up and running, and still nothing.

wildcardjack:As someone who gets a lot of services through FedEx and UPS I gotta say neither belongs on the board. They're both six sigma grade companies and rarely present problems.

Ontrac and Lasership tend to be the ones that worry me. But it's not my choice which one carries my product, it's always about time and money as calculated by the elves.

Ontrac and Lasership aren't in my area, so I can't speak to them, but I am having a *real* issue with UPS right now. The last 3 deliveries they have made consisted of the driver dropping the package on my doorstep and taking off.

I wouldn't make a big deal out of it but all 3 packages were shipped "Adult Signature Only - Validate ID" because I am a home-based FFL dealer and all 3 packages contained firearms. The first 2 I found quickly because I noticed the truck driving away, but this last one (containing a Bushmaster AR-15) ended up leaning against my front door all night long.

Sent an e-mail to the regional managers office explaining the situation and offering to forward them the footage from the security cameras...not a peep out of them.

andyofne:gunga galunga: Karac: gunga galunga: Elzar: Jesus there are a bunch of farking whiners about Sim City. I've played Sim City since a couple days after launch and no issues for me. Of course I am rather casual, but still...

I love the SimCity series but held off on this latest one after the bad press. How does it measure up to the others in the series?

From what I've heard: the city sizes are smaller, you (and EA's servers) have to be in constant contact, it's forced multiplayer, and because of the multiplayer aspect you can't save and reload.

That last bit is what would really irk me. They've taken away the opportunity to say "GOD DAMN IT" and wipe out your city in a hailstorm of godzilla, meltdowns, and hurricanes - then reload the last save tomorrow.

Forced multiplayer? That's all I need to know. Thanks.

Set up a private area and don't invite anyone. You're all alone.

True, but that still doesn't allow for you to nuke the city for fun then reload a previous save. This coupled with the extremely poor agent AI makes running a nuke power plant very very dangerous. Nuke plants require highly educated workers. Unskilled workers increase the chance of a meltdown. The way the agent AI works however is that a worker leaves residential and stops at the first building it encounters with an unfilled job slot. If that happens to be your nuke plant, and the worker happens to be one of the 10% of your population that never went to college... BOOM!!!

EA may get some sympathy or some "wait and see" on the vote now that Riccitiello's out (the 29th is his last day). I think Sim City might have been what finally made the shareholders say "ok John, you can either step down voluntarily or we'll fire your ass. After DA2. SWTOR, ME3, and now this, we just can't take any more losses and horrible press."

Sweet baby Jesus, I hope they get someone actually competent in to take over...

MBZ321:Can we nominate The Consumerist?...Just because they disabled their own on-site Comment system months and months ago, blamed "hackers", promised they would have it back up and running, and still nothing.

Why make them the worst for the best thing they ever did? Consumerist commenters ranked right up there with Yahoo and Youtube commenters.

andyofne:Elzar: Jesus there are a bunch of farking whiners about Sim City. I've played Sim City since a couple days after launch and no issues for me. Of course I am rather casual, but still...

It has a lot of issues. They probably did rush the release and didn't do good beta testing / QA.

They didn't rush the release or skimp on the testing. They just did what a lot of other companies have since broadband internet became popular - let the customers do the testing. It was nice, back in the day when having to release patches was considered to be embarrassing.